The Alan Parsons Project – Eye In The Sky
An evening pause: Performed live, with a full orchestra, 2013.
Hat tip John Jossy.
Category: Behind The Black
August 24, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- NASA administrator Bill Nelson swoons in tour of Blue Origin’s New Glenn manufacturing facility
Jay notes that “Someone mentioned that these components are the same ones from the June 14th photo.” That photo can be seen here, and it certainly looks like Blue Origin has simply rearranged the deck chairs.
- Perseverance science team touts rover’s 19th core sample
If you listen closely to the two scientists in the video, they really can only guess about much of this geology, since Perseverance does not have the same geological capabilites as Curiosity. They can make some superficial analysis of the rocks, but the more detailed work will have to wait until those core samples are returned to Earth. Curiosity however can not only drill, but it has equipment to analyze those drill samples itself, there. While Curiosity can’t do what an Earth lab would do, it does it now. With Perseverance we will have to wait a decade or more to get to the samples.
Today’s blacklisted American: Real estate company fires a mother for expressing her opinions
Janet Roberson and her family
They’re coming for you next: A California mother of three, Janet Roberson, was fired only days after she stood up at her local school board and objected to the queer curriculum the board was forcing on young children. This is what she had said:
Janet Roberson spoke at a Benicia Unified School District (BUSD) meeting on April 20, where she expressed concerns about the district’s sexual education curriculum that she said taught “gender confusion, not gender clarification” because it told 10-year-old students they could choose their own gender and receive puberty blockers. She said teaching “vulnerable children that lifetime dependence on medical care is a viable option is completely unacceptable and evil.”
“Children are being asked to identify their pronouns and this is now part of the ten-year-old curriculum,” Roberson said of the curriculum. “This forces a gender discussion beyond the scope of the state requirements and complicates an already overburdened classroom environment.”
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Big mountains everywhere inside Valles Marineris
Click for original image.
While the giant canyon Valles Marineris on Mars is known best as the biggest known canyon in the solar system — large enough to cover the continental United States several times over — that size tends to diminish the mountainous nature of its interior. Today’s cool image attempts once again (see for example these earlier posts here, here, here, here, and here) to illustrate that stupendous and mountainous nature.
The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 15, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The goal of the picture was to get a better view of the numerous layers of this terraced cliff wall. What I see, however from my tourist’s perspective, is a steep wall that descends almost 4,500 feet from the high to the low point in just over three miles. This is as steep if not steeper than the walls of the Grand Canyon.
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Biden’s Justice Department sues SpaceX
The corrupt and very partisan Justice Department of the Biden administration today sued SpaceX for discriminating against refugees and illegal immigrants because it restricts hiring to “U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.”
The lawsuit states SpaceX “failed to fairly consider” and “refused to hire” the asylees and refugees who ended up applying anyway. It also alleges that SpaceX “wrongly claimed” that the US’s export control laws allowed it to only hire US citizens and lawful residents. Additionally, the DOJ claims SpaceX hired “only” US citizens and green card holders from September 2018 to September 2020.
“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, says in a statement.
Justice is demanding compensation and back pay for anyone “deterred or denied employment”, as well as civil penalties.
This suit is utter garbage and puts SpaceX between a rock and a hard place. I guarantee if SpaceX had hired any illegal or refugee who was not yet a legal citizen, Biden’s State Department would have immediately sued it for violating other laws relating to ITAR (the export control laws mentioned) which try to prevent the theft of technology by foreign powers.
The Biden administration considers Elon Musk an opponent, and since it is now moving to indict and even imprison all political opposition, it is no surprise it is beginning to use lawfare against him. As I have written repeatedly, it has almost certainly pressured the FAA to slow walk any launch license approvals for SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy. This lawsuit today simply provides further evidence that my prediction will be right that the next orbital test flight of that rocket will be delayed months.
North Korea fails again to get a military reconnaissance satellite into orbit
According to a report in North Korea’s state run press, a launch attempt of its new rocket Chollima-1 rocket failed to reach orbit at dawn today, its payload of a classified military reconnaissance satellite falling into the ocean.
The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang reported that the National Aerospace Development Administration launched the new Chollima-1 rocket “at dawn” August 24 from the Sohae Satellite Launch Center. The first and second stages worked as planned, but “the launch failed due to an error in the emergency blasting system during the third stage flight” according to KCNA.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency identified the satellite as Malligyong-1, a military reconnaissance satellite and reported the launch time as 3:50 am local time (2:50 pm August 23 EDT).
The flight path can be found here. An earlier attempt in May failed also, but the cause was not specified. South Korea did recover the first stage and satellite from the May failure, claiming later the satellite had “no military utility.”
I expect South Korea to once again attempt recovery operations, but because the rocket traveled farther I also expect the chances of any recovery of material to be more unlikely.
India’s Pragyan rover has successfully been deployed on the lunar surface
Click for interactive map.
According to a tweet from India’s space agency ISRO late yesterday, the Pragyan rover has successfully rolled down its ramp and is now deployed on the lunar surface.
No further updates have yet been released. According to ISRO’s mission webpage the instruments on both Vikram and Pragyan are as follows:
Lander payloads: Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure the thermal conductivity and temperature; Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA) for measuring the seismicity around the landing site; Langmuir Probe (LP) to estimate the plasma density and its variations. A passive Laser Retroreflector Array from NASA is accommodated for lunar laser ranging studies.
Rover payloads: Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) for deriving the elemental composition in the vicinity of landing site.
Pragyan’s two spectroscopes are likely similar to instruments on Curiosity and Perseverance on Mars, and allows some good surface analysis. Without a scoop however there will be no analysis of anything below the ground, unless the rover can upend a rock using its wheels.
Rocket Lab launches a satellite reusing one rocket engine from previous flight
Rocket Lab not only successfully launched a satellite tonight (August 24 in New Zealand), its first stage used a rocket engine that had flown previously.
In addition, the first stage was designed to be reused, and was quickly recovered after it splashed down in the Pacific. The plan is to refly either this or another recovered first stage in one of the company’s upcoming launches in the coming months, making Rocket Lab the second private company in the world, after SpaceX, to reuse a first stage.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
57 SpaceX
36 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 66 to 36. It also leads the entire world combined, 66 to 59. SpaceX by itself still trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) 57 to 59 in successful launches.
Amy Winehouse – Back To Black
An evening pause: I admit that I was never a fan of Winehouse, but quality is still quality, even if one has different tastes.
Hat tip Doug Johnson.
August 23, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, and posted early today because Diane and I will be out having dinner with friends this evening.
- ULA’s CEO touts the completion of modifications to the upper stage of its Vulcan rocket
This stage is for that first launch, still targeting the fourth quarter of 2023, but expected by many to slip in 2024. He adds in another tweet that ULA has seven upper stages being assembled, and of the two that were completed but needed modification, one has been modified and the other will be used for ground testing.
- Comet P1 Nishimura might brighten to naked eye visibility in the next few weeks
And then again, it might not.
- Japan: North Korea gearing up for another orbital launch attempt
The window is from August 24 to August 31, and appears to be a second attempt to get orbit following the the failed orbital launch attempt from May.
- Video from Russian describing how students are designing its proposed space station
It is in Russian, but Jay was able to obtain an English translation. I could not. He says, “While they are at it, they can make a lunar lander too.” Both he and I believe this is a Potemkin village effort, and while good for educating students will lead nowhere for adding anything to Russia’s space program.
- Rocket Lab’s CEO shows off a picture of the company’s Electron production line
As Jay notes, “Blue Origin take note.”
Blacklisted 12-year-old appeals lower court decision saying he has no free speech rights
Liam Morrison, wearing the evil shirt that he wore the
second time teachers at Nichols Middle School sent
him home.
Bring a gun to a knife fight: Today’s blacklist story is a follow-up from May. At that time 12-year-old Liam Morrison had discovered that his school, Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, would not allow him to wear a shirt that said “There are only two genders,” and when he tried to return to school with a shirt that instead said “There are only censored genders,” he was sent home again.
Morrison and his parents enlisted the non-profit legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom to sue for his first amendment rights, but in June Judge Indira Talwani (appointed by Barack Obama) ruled that Morrison had no right to the first amendment, that his shirt infringed other “students’ rights to be ‘secure and to be let alone’ during the school day.”
You can read her convoluted ruling here [pdf], which required her to ignore numerous previous Supreme Court rulings that have specifically protected student speech exactly like Morrison’s. Moreover, her decision is also based on the fraudulent premise that people are supposed to be protected from speech that offends them. If people have the power to silence any speech because it hurts their feelings then no free speech exists at all. We will live in a totalitarian nightmare worse than anything dreamed up by George Orwell.
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Where the Martian landscape begins to dry out
Click for original image.
Today’s cool image to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, provides us a glimpse at the lower mid-latitudes of Mars where the terrain is beginning to dry out as we move south. The picture was taken on April 29, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the scientists label “large linear features.”
The main north-south ridge is only about 20-25 feet high, and its meandering nature (which can be seen more clearly in the full image) suggests it is possibly an inverted channel, formed when the bed of a former canyon gets compressed by the water or ice that flows through it, and when the surrounding terrain gets eroded away that channel bed becomes a ridge.
These ridges however could also possibly be volcanic dikes, where magma had pushed up through fractures and faults to form these more resistant ridges.
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August 22, 2023 Zimmerman/Space Show podcast
The podcast of my appearance last night on the Space Show with David Livingston is now available. You can download it here.
As always, it was a good discussion about a number of interesting topics.
First mission in Isaacman’s private space program delayed again
The first mission in the Polaris space program of manned flights by billionaire Jared Isaacman, using SpaceX’s manned spacecraft and rockets, has now been delayed until early in 2024.
Isaacman, in the podcast interview, suggested the delays were linked to the development of a new spacesuit required for a spacewalk, the first by a private astronaut mission, planned for Polaris Dawn. “We’ve had a little bit more free time this summer than we probably would have expected,” he said, which he attributed to the timing of spacesuit development and training. That effort “doesn’t always sync up, so we’ve had a little more free time with family and work this summer.”
That new suit, billed as the first new spacesuit developed in the United States in four decades, is critical to future human activities on moon and Mars, he argued. “We’re going to need spacesuits that don’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars in order to do that. We’re pretty excited because the suit that we are testing out, the evolution of it someday could be very well worn by people that are walking on the moon or Mars.”
This mission, dubbed Polaris Dawn, will use a Falcon 9 and one of SpaceX’s fleet of four manned Dragon capsules to spend several days in Earth orbit while conducting that first private spacewalk. Isaacman’s entire Polaris program includes two more manned missions,the second possibly aimed at raising and even doing maintenance on the Hubble Space Telescope, and the third using Starship to go around the Moon.
Isaacman has already flown one private mission in space, in 2021, dubbed Inspiration4. It flew for three days in orbit, carrying four passengers, including Isaacman himself. Since it did not dock with ISS, it was an entirely private manned mission, with no significant government involvement.
Space junk that ESA demo mission intends to de-orbit as been struck by another piece of space junk
In a strange bit of irony, an abandoned payload adapter from a mission launched a decade ago that a European Space Agency (ESA) mission was planning on capturing and de-orbiting has been hit by another piece of space junk, creating additional bits debris around it.
The adapter is a conical-shaped leftover, roughly 250 pounds (113 kg) in mass, from a 2013 Vega launch that sent a small fleet of satellites into orbit. Space tracking systems found new objects nearby the adapter, which ESA learned about on Aug. 10. The objects are likely space debris from a “hypervelocity impact of a small, untracked object” that smacked into the payload adapter, the agency said. We may never know if the crashing object was natural or artificial, given it didn’t appear in tracking systems.
The ESA mission, dubbed Clearspace-1, intends to launch in 2026 and use four grappling arms to grasp the payload adapter, after which both shall be sent to burn up in the atmosphere. Its goal is to demonstrate technology for removing space junk. This event, creating extra debris pieces around the payload adaptor, puts a kink on that mission while also underlining the need for such technology.
Mission engineers now have three years to figure out what, if anything, they need to do to deal with the extra debris. The good news so far is that it appears the payload adapter remains intact, its orbit has not changed, and the surrounding debris appears small enough to pose “negligible” risk.
India successfully lands Vikram on the Moon
Click for interactive map.
India this morning successfully placed its Vikram lander, carrying its Pragyan rover, on the surface of the Moon in the high southern latitudes.
I have embedded the live stream below, cued to just before landing.
The next challenge is getting Pragyan to roll off Vikram, and spend the next two weeks exploring the nearby terrain. The mission of both it and Vikram is only planned to last through the daylight portion of the 28-day-long lunar day, so it is not expected for either to survive the lunar night. Both will make observations, but the main purpose of this mission has already been accomplished, demonstrating that India has the technological capability to land an unmanned spacecraft on another planet. That the landing was in the high southern latitudes added one extra challenge to the mission.
August 22, 2023 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Russia launches Progress freighter to ISS
Russia tonight successfully used its Soyuz-2 rocket to launch a new Progress freighter to ISS, lifting off from its Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
57 SpaceX
36 China
12 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
6 India
In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 65 to 36. It also leads the entire world combined, 65 to 59. SpaceX by itself is still in a neck-in-neck race with the rest of the world (excluding American companies), now trailing 57 to 59 in successful launches.
VisioRacer – Audi’s Audi’s Supercharged V16 racecars of the 1930s
An evening pause: Some automotive racecar history from before WWII, showing cars then capable of going more than 250 miles per hour.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
I will NOT wear a mask, part two
Here we go again! When the first panic over COVID arrived in 2020 and government thugs and their leftist minions in the culture began demanding that everyone wear a mask, I wrote the following:
It apparently has not been enough that they have successfully destroyed a thriving economy, put millions out of work, destroyed the airline, entertainment, sports, and restaurant industries, over a disease that, at best is nothing more than a slight blip in the overall death rate, and at worst will be comparable to similar past epidemics that we lived through without government-imposed panic or economic disaster.
No, destroying millions of lives has not been enough. They need to do more. They need to find more ways to squelch our freedom, nullify the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and, to paraphrase Orwell, stamp a boot down on our faces, forever.
And in this case, they mean to do this, almost literally.
They are now beginning to demand that we wear masks at all times in public, in the mindless and stupid belief that this will somehow stop COVID-19 from spreading.
I also declared unequivocally that I would not wear a mask, “and if you demand it of me you will have a revolution on your hands.”
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